The company is only ten years old and Google is already facing some harsh criticism here, in the States. If you thought that the first case by the government against Google was going to be about their overwhelming knowledge of your day-to-day life or for their compliance with Chinese censoring, you were wrong. The U.S. Department of Justice is apparently considering bringing an anti-trust suit against the tech giant in relation to their large stake in the advertising industry. In fact, they’ve gone so far as to appoint a high-powered lawyer to the case; who is at this moment going over the information to decide whether or not there is a winnable case. That lawyer, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, was the Justice Department antitrust chief under Jimmy Carter way back when, so it’s safe to say that he knows his stuff.

The case is mainly focusing on Google’s recent deal with Yahoo!, in which the two companies combined to become the largest online search ad company in the U.S., with 80% of U.S. such ads. Other aspects of Google’s search dominance might be under scrutiny, as well, but Google does not sound scared in the least:

“We voluntarily delayed implementation of this arrangement to give the Department of Justice time to understand it, and we continue to work cooperatively with them,” Google said. “While there has been a lot of speculation about this agreement’s potential impact on advertisers or ad prices, we think it would be premature for regulators to halt the agreement before we implement it and everyone can judge the actual impact.”

How one company can come out of nowhere so quickly to become a household name with its hand in just about everything is astonishing, and Google doesn’t fear the impending, perhaps inevitable, backlash against them. Why should they? They’re probably indexing the Justice Department’s files as we speak.

Reader Comments

handskome

Its starting, all great empires fall, its history’s cycle. And this is one of the reasons America will too, its because they keep doing things to control everything. If you want to upload your picture to your site using google’s browser they have immediate rights to it. If you want to open a small business, you get taxed, regulated, questioned, and it was only a lemonade stand. People can only take so much, before they bite back. Pretty soon don’t be suprised if google is hated more than microsoft.